Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) is today. The official commemoration runs from sundown Wednesday to sundown Thursday. In this video recorded last year, you see the moment of remembrance announced by sirens in an unnamed city in Israel. -via reddit

See a gallery of pictures taken during Holocaust Remembrance Day at The Washington Post. Link

These "moments of silence" and what-not seem to me to be periods of time in which people drum up feelings of disgust, anger and futility. I guess my concern is that, that's not at all useful to preventing like atrocities. Disgust and anger may very well be the mental states which led to the Holocaust. I would think it much more beneficial to spend the time studying human psychology and the events that lead to the Holocaust. In that exercise we may hope to glean some underlying causes that could subsequently be avoided.

Perhaps there should be an annual review of Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgrim's experiments on human obedience.

Except that in this particular moment of silence, there's a good chance that a fair few of those people stopping lost a relative -- grandparent, parent, sibling, aunt -- in the holocaust. I see the pause as more of a moment of remembrance, not a preventative measure or time to focus on past trauma.